Beauty Editing

Start in Lightroom, Finish in Photoshop: A Portrait Retoucher's Workflow Breakdown
Video Tutorials

Start in Lightroom, Finish in Photoshop: A Portrait Retoucher's Workflow Breakdown

There was a period early in my retouching career when I was jumping into Photoshop the moment a file landed on my hard drive. No sorting, no initial tone work, no white balance correction. Just straight into layers and healing brushes, wondering why my skin work always felt like I was fighting the image instead of working with it. It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that the order of operations matters as much as the techniques themselves.

Aperture, Dodge & Burn, and the Lighting Truth Every Portrait Retoucher Needs to Hear
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Aperture, Dodge & Burn, and the Lighting Truth Every Portrait Retoucher Needs to Hear

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from receiving a portrait file where the photographer made choices you now have to work around in post. Muddy backgrounds competing with the subject. A face that’s half-lit because the aperture was set too wide on a two-person shot. Or skin tones so blown out from compensating for a dark environment that no amount of careful retouching will save the highlight detail. I’ve been on the receiving end of all of these, and after years of freelancing for beauty brands, I can tell you that understanding the relationship between aperture, light, and skin texture is just as important for retouchers as it is for photographers.

Two-Pass Skin Retouching: How to Fix Blemishes AND Uneven Tone (Without the Plastic Look)
Video Tutorials

Two-Pass Skin Retouching: How to Fix Blemishes AND Uneven Tone (Without the Plastic Look)

Early in my retouching career, I got a call from a client who said my edits made her model look like “a video game character.” She wasn’t wrong. I had smoothed the skin so aggressively that every pore, every trace of human texture, had been erased. The image was technically clean and completely lifeless. That call sent me down a long road of figuring out how to fix skin without destroying it, and the answer, it turns out, lives in working at two completely different scales.

The Milky Skin Lightroom Preset Explained: How to Build That Soft, Film-Like Glow From Scratch
Video Tutorials

The Milky Skin Lightroom Preset Explained: How to Build That Soft, Film-Like Glow From Scratch

There’s a specific client email I dread. Not the “can you fix the lighting” email, and not even the “can you make me look thinner” email. The one that gets me is the “the skin looks a little… plastic?” message. I spent the early part of my retouching career chasing smoothness so aggressively that I’d sand all the life right out of a face. What I actually wanted, and what clients actually respond to, is softness.

Stop Guessing at Skin Tones: A Photoshop Selective Color Walkthrough That Actually Works
Video Tutorials

Stop Guessing at Skin Tones: A Photoshop Selective Color Walkthrough That Actually Works

Skin color correction is one of those things that looks simple until you’re forty minutes into a job, your client is waiting, and the model’s complexion has somehow turned the color of old guacamole. I spent the first two years of my retouching career relying on intuition and a lot of undoing, nudging curves until something felt right. It worked, sort of, but it was slow and inconsistent. The technique I’m walking through today changed that completely.

What Scott Kelby's Light It. Shoot It. Retouch It. Finally Gets Right About Teaching Portrait Retouching
Video Tutorials

What Scott Kelby's Light It. Shoot It. Retouch It. Finally Gets Right About Teaching Portrait Retouching

There’s a particular kind of frustration that every self-taught retoucher knows. You find a tutorial with gorgeous results, you follow along as carefully as you can, and what you end up with looks nothing like the final image. Not even close. The gap between “here’s the concept” and “here’s exactly how to do it” is where most instructional content quietly falls apart. I spent years filling that gap by trial and error, and I have a hard drive full of over-processed, plastic-looking portraits to prove it.

Why Your Makeup Retouching Looks Fake (And the Layered Mask Workflow That Fixed It For Me)
Retouching Techniques

Why Your Makeup Retouching Looks Fake (And the Layered Mask Workflow That Fixed It For Me)

A few years into freelancing, I got a message from a client that I still think about. She’d hired me to retouch a series of beauty shots for a skincare campaign, and after I delivered the first round, she wrote back: “The skin looks great, but the lipstick looks like it was painted on in Microsoft Paint.” She wasn’t wrong. I had dodged and burned the lip color directly on the original layer, flattened the texture, and produced something that looked like a wax figure wearing a lip stain.

What America's Next Top Model's Bare-Skin Shoot Teaches Us About Honest Beauty Retouching
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What America's Next Top Model's Bare-Skin Shoot Teaches Us About Honest Beauty Retouching

There’s a particular kind of dread I recognize in the faces of those America’s Next Top Model contestants before their no-makeup shoot. I felt a version of it myself years ago, early in my retouching career, when a client sent back my work with the note: “These look real.” She did not mean it as a compliment. That moment cracked something open for me about what we actually owe the people we photograph and retouch – and what “beautiful” is even supposed to mean when we strip away all the tools we usually reach for.

Frequency Separation in Photoshop: A Step-by-Step Skin Retouching Guide (Based on Jessica Kobeissi's Technique)
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Frequency Separation in Photoshop: A Step-by-Step Skin Retouching Guide (Based on Jessica Kobeissi's Technique)

There’s a specific kind of dread that comes from delivering a round of portraits and hearing back that the skin looks “plastic.” I know that dread firsthand. Early in my retouching career, I was so focused on removing every blemish and evening out every tone that I was essentially painting over my subjects’ faces. The results were technically smooth and completely lifeless. Learning frequency separation was the moment that changed everything for me, because it finally let me work on the color and texture of skin as two separate problems instead of one blunt instrument.

How to Remove Skin Redness in Photoshop Using Hue/Saturation (The Right Way)
Video Tutorials

How to Remove Skin Redness in Photoshop Using Hue/Saturation (The Right Way)

There’s a specific kind of client email I used to dread. The one that arrives two days after delivery, very polite, that says something like: “The skin still looks a little red in a few spots.” Early in my retouching work, my answer to redness was almost always the same wrong tool: the Brush tool, a sampled skin tone, and way too much opacity. The results looked painted. I’d fix the redness and introduce something worse.

Face-Aware Liquify in Photoshop CC 2015.5: A Portrait Retoucher's Step-by-Step Breakdown
Video Tutorials

Face-Aware Liquify in Photoshop CC 2015.5: A Portrait Retoucher's Step-by-Step Breakdown

Before Face-Aware Liquify existed, reshaping a face in Photoshop meant dragging the standard Liquify brush around like you were trying to ice a cake with a spatula. You’d nudge a jawline, overshoot it, pull it back, and end up with something that looked vaguely melted. I burned through a lot of hours that way early in my retouching career, and more than one client politely described my results as “a little off.

The Three Colors That Will Always Betray a Heavy Hand in Editing
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The Three Colors That Will Always Betray a Heavy Hand in Editing

I’ve been retouching portraits for over a decade, and I’ve learned that certain editing mistakes are absolutely impossible to hide—no matter how skilled you are with your tools. After working with hundreds of clients, I’ve identified three specific colors that our brains are wired to scrutinize more carefully than anything else in a photograph. The Three Colors That Give Us Away When we edit a jacket color or shift the tone of a background wall, most viewers won’t catch the change.